Little Bastards in Springtime by Katja Rudolph Read Free Book Online Page A

disappears back into his office.
    “Jevrem,” cries Olga, finally seeing me standing in the kitchen door. “There you are. I don’t see you for a few months and what do you do? You grow big and handsome.”
    Here it comes. I remember her now, she’s a hugger.
    “Come here. Let me give you a hug.”
    I don’t move. Mama laughs, then rescues me by pulling me onto her lap. “Jevrem is our soccer star. He runs like a cheetah.” I love sitting on Mama’s lap. She presses me against her chest like I’m her most precious possession in the world.
    “Tomas is organizing the ten-part series,” Olga says. “Bach, Scriabin, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev. How is your piano playing, Jevrem? Your mama tells me you have promise.”
    “Okay,” I say. But I haven’t practised for days. Now that I think of it, I kind of miss it.
    “That’s wonderful,” Mama says. “What is the venue?”
    “The Academy,” Olga says. “Tomas goes on and on about Leningrad, their endless siege, how the city’s musicians dropped dead from starvation in the middle of performances. This he thinks is terribly romantic, an example of the noble human spirit, how music overcomes all worldly evil. But I think it’s sentimental horseshit, Sofija. No, actually, I think it’s sick.”
    “Shh. Please, Olga,” Mama says, and nods her head at me.
    “Oh, he has to hear these things, Sofija. Real life is already harsher for him than anything we can say. We must keep playing, but we must never pretend that playing until we die means that we’ve won some kind of moral victory. We will win when the men in the hills are driven away, when our fascist leaders are driven out of office.”
    “Who can live with themselves, shooting at women and children and old men?”
    “It’s just a tactic of war.” Olga is fidgety. She twists a corner of her scarf round and round her forefinger. “They’re told it’s essential to their survival, for their children’s survival, that it’s necessary. Twentieth-century war is waged against civilians, all of it, siege or no siege. There is no ethical and unethical war anymore, it’s all a massacre.”
    Mama shivers and shakes her head. She doesn’t want to talk about this anymore. “I hear Ponthus is coming to give a concert,” she says, and walks her fingers up and down my arm.
    “Oh yes, just watch. All kinds of international artists and personalities will suddenly pour into our city to cheer us up by feeding our poor, savage souls.”
    “You’re so cynical, Olga. People need to be uplifted.”
    “People need this war to end. The negotiators are just protecting their own interests.” Olga knocks back the rest of her coffee.
    “Well, what can we do about that?”
    Olga shrugs her shoulders, lights another cigarette. “The process has been hijacked by all the wrong people telling the wrong stories.”
    They sit in silence, staring off at nothing. They never have an answer past this point: why the wrong people are in power, who let them get there, how to get rid of them. I fiddle with the bracelet on Mama’s wrist, I steal a sip of coffee.
    “Well, on a more cheerful note,” Mama says suddenly, “shall we get Papa to go out and find us some pizza?”
    “Yes, yes,” I say.
    “It’s still safe in your mahala,” Olga says. “But I wouldn’t stay out too long.”
    I want to go with Papa, but Mama says no. I slouch to my room and stand in the middle of it, not knowing what to donext. Boredom feels like a terrible flu. My bones hurt. I knock on Dušan’s door but he ignores me. He just wants to be out with his friends. Aisha and Berina are in their room. I can hear them through the door talking in high chipmunk voices. They’re lucky, they have each other to play with all the time.
    “Do you want to play with us?” Berina has suddenly opened the door. She has this way of looking up at me, her head tipped to one side, that is hard to say no to. “No,” I say anyway, just so they know they can’t push me